Everything about Carl Zuckmayer totally explained
Carl Zuckmayer (
December 27,
1896 –
January 18,
1977) was a
German writer and
playwright.
Born in
Nackenheim in
Rheinhessen, he was four years old when his family moved to Mainz. With the outbreak of
World War I, he (like many other high school students) finished school with a facilitated "emergency"-
Abitur and volunteered for the Army. During the war he served on the western front. In 1917, he published first poems in the pacifist publication
"Die Aktion".
After the war, he took up studies at the
University of Frankfurt, first in
humanities, later in
biology and
botany. In 1920, he married his childhood friend Annemarie Ganz, but they were divorced already one year later, when Zuckmayer had an affair with actress Annemarie Seidel.
His first ventures into literature and theatre were complete failures. His first drama
Kreuzweg (1921) fell flat and was delisted after only three performances, and when he was chosen as dramatic adviser at the theatre of
Kiel, he lost his new job after his first, controversial staging of
Terence's
The Eunuch. In 1924 he became
dramaturg at the
Deutsches Theater in
Berlin, jointly with
Bertolt Brecht. After another failure with his second drama
Pankraz erwacht oder Die Hinterwäldler he finally had a great public success with the comedy
Der fröhliche Weinberg ("
The Merry Vineyard") in 1925, which won him the
Kleist Prize.
Also in 1925, he married the Austrian actress
Alice Herdan, and they bought a house in
Henndorf near
Salzburg in
Austria. Zuckmayer's next play
Der Schinderhannes was again successful. In 1929, he wrote the script for the movie
Der blaue Engel (starring
Marlene Dietrich) based on the novel
Professor Unrat by
Heinrich Mann. That year, he was also awarded the
Georg Büchner Prize, another prestigious
German language literary award.
In
1931, his play
Der Hauptmann von Köpenick premiered and became another success. But when the
Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, his plays were prohibited. Zuckmayer and his family moved to their house in Austria, where he published a few more works. After the
Anschluss, he was expatriated by the
Nazi government, and the Zuckmayers fled via
Switzerland to the
United States in 1939, where he first worked as a script writer in
Hollywood before buying a farm in
Vermont and working as a farmer until 1946.
After
World War II, he became a naturalized
U.S. citizen and worked for the U.S government. He returned to
Germany as a cultural attaché, participating in the post-war investigations. His play
Des Teufels General ("The Devil's General"; the main character is based on the biography of
Ernst Udet), which he'd written in Vermont, premiered in
Zürich on
December 14,
1946. The play became a major success in post-war Germany; one of the first post-war literary attempts to broach the issue of
Nazism. It was filmed in 1955 starring
Curd Jürgens.
Zuckmayer kept writing:
Barbara Blomberg premiered in
Konstanz in 1949,
Das kalte Licht in
Hamburg in 1955. Having shuttled back and forth between the U.S. and Europe for several years, the Zuckmayers left the U.S. in 1958 and settled in
Saas Fee in the
Valais in
Switzerland. In 1966, he became Swiss citizen, and he published his memoirs entitled
Als wär's ein Stück von mir ("As if it were part of myself"). His last play
Der Rattenfänger premiered in
Zürich in 1975. Zuckmayer died 1977 in
Visp and was interred on
January 22,
1977 in
Saas Fee.
Zuckmayer had been granted numerous awards, such as the
Goethe Prize of the city of
Frankfurt in
1952, the
Bundesverdienstkreuz mit Stern in 1955, the
Austrian Staatspreis für Literatur in 1960,
Pour le Mérite in 1967, and the Austrian
Verdienstkreuz am Band in
1968.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Carl Zuckmayer'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://carl_zuckmayer.totallyexplained.com">Carl Zuckmayer Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
